About Hacker School

 

The basics

Hacker School is a free, full-time, immersive school in New York for becoming a better programmer. We're like a writers' retreat for programmers. People come from around the world to spend 12 weeks writing code and growing as programmers. We run three sessions a year, called batches, and each batch has about 60 people. We make money by helping companies hire our alumni.

Our pedagogy

Hacker School is a "school" in the sense that it's a place people come to learn, but we intentionally forgo many of the trappings of traditional schools. We don't have grades, degrees, classes, or a fixed curriculum.
Instead, Hacker School is largely unstructured, self-directed, and project-based. That's because we value internal motivation over external motivation, and self-direction over coercion. We believe people learn best when they have the freedom to explore their interests and passions, surrounded by friendly and intellectually curious peers and mentors.
This does not mean that Hacker School is a vacuum. Every batch brims with optional activities and structure: reading groups, mini workshops and seminars, weekly dinners and talks, group presentations, and more. Much of this is driven by Hacker Schoolers themselves, and is the result of the preconditions of Hacker School. When you bring together a bunch of smart and friendly people who all want to learn and help each other grow, great things happen. For instance, one Hacker Schooler wanted increased accountability for blogging regularly, and so he organized a successful weekly "Iron Blogger" group.

Our environment

We've designed Hacker School with one thing above all else in mind: How to make the best place for people to grow as programmers. Almost everything we do can be traced back to this goal.
The atmosphere here is friendly and intellectual, and we try to remove as many obstacles in the way of people's growth as possible.
We know it takes deliberate practice and large chunks of time to really get better, which is why Hacker School is full-time for three months. We know it can be hard to keep yourself on track, which is why we have morning checkins to provide support and friendly social pressure.
We know lots of people are afraid to admit they don't understand things, which is why we have a social rule barring "feigned surprise" and we encourage people to explore and expose their ignorance. We know stereotype threat is a real issue, which is why we strive for gender balance. We know individualized feedback can be critical to growth, which is why we have facilitators to pair with and get code review from.

Facilitators

Instead of teachers, we have facilitators. Facilitators are full-time Hacker School employees and are resources for you to draw on during your time at Hacker School. Since they're not teachers in the traditional sense, neither they nor anyone else will be dictating how you take advantage of all the resources here.
You can think of facilitators as experienced Hacker Schoolers who are paid to help you get as much as possible out of the batch. They can pair with you, review your code, brainstorm project ideas, help get your dev environment set up, direct you to other Hacker Schoolers or residents, and do anything else within reason to make your time here more productive and educational.

Residents

Residents are particularly accomplished programmers who spend one or two weeks at Hacker School and work directly with students. They give talks, run small workshops, and do lots of code review and pairing.
We don't believe there's an upper bound for experience at Hacker School. Even very experienced programmers can improve with three months of focused, deliberate practice in a supportive community. Residents help us build that community, so that even the most advanced Hacker Schoolers have a chance to work with someone who will blow their minds.
Our fall 2013 residents are Will Byrd, Mel Chua, Philip Guo, Lindsey Kuper, Jacqui Maher, Jessica McKellar, Yaron Minsky, and Alex Rudnick. You can read more about them on our residents page.

Who comes to Hacker School?

Hacker School is for people who want to become better programmers. We are not startup school nor are we a bootcamp: Our focus is helping people become better programmers, not building prototypes, and we're not a training program for web developers.
Because there is no certification or grading, the only reason to come to Hacker School is to become a better programmer. As such, you will find kindred spirits and tremendous energy. We look for smart, friendly, self-directed, intellectually curious people who enjoy programming and want to get dramatically better.
Hacker Schoolers are extraordinarily diverse, and range in everything from age (17 to late 50s) to previous programming experience (eight weeks to 30 years) to past profession (ex-Googlers to former ballet dancers).
That said, we've had nearly 300 Hacker Schoolers, so there are some patterns that have emerged. The following is not an exhaustive list, but it does cover some of the groups of people who come to Hacker School:

• Experienced programmers, especially those working at startups, who want to take a sabbatical to focus on programming as a craft
• Physicists, chemists, biologists, and other natural scientists. Sometimes they're explicitly looking to leave academia, and sometimes they just want to learn how to write more modular, maintainable, and readable code.
• Professionals who want to make a career change. The three most common professions Hacker Schoolers have come from are finance, consulting, and law, but we've had everyone from college professors to journalists.
• Parents who left programming for a few years to raise families and who have now returned to it.
• Programmers who have been stuck at large, boring companies (hello, Boeing and IBM) who want to work on more interesting problems.
• Undergraduate and graduate students who choose to spend a semester or summer at Hacker School.

If you're curious to learn more demographic information, check out our blog post, Who comes to Hacker School?

What do people work on?

Hacker School projects are as diverse as the people who come here. The size, scope, and type of projects people build are largely dependent on their current programming level. We encourage people to work on things that are one or two steps beyond their comfort zone, which means newer programmers tend to work on a few small projects, and more advanced programmers tend to tackle larger projects.
Everyone writes free and open source software, because it would be antithetical to Hacker School to write code that couldn't be read, used, and improved by others. Popular projects include networked games, BitTorrent clients, and simple AIs.
Here is a small selection of some of the more substantial projects Hacker Schoolers have made:

• WebStack.jl, a web framework for Julia
• webRTC.io, an abstraction layer for webRTC
• Strucjure, a parsing and pattern matching library in Clojure
• Stork, a new programming language
• Turtles, a Lisp interpreter for the Apple IIe
• a Dropbox client for Haiku
• a BitTorrent client in Python
• capybara-touch, a tool that runs your tests against Mobile WebKit via the iOS Simulator
• Coquette, a micro framework for JavaScript games
• Dvorany, an Arduino-powered box that lets you use a Dvorak keyboard layout on any computer

Additionally, Hacker Schoolers frequently contribute to established open source projects, and have had dozens of patches accepted and pull requests merged.
One important thing to know is that you do not need to have any specific project in mind before you come to Hacker School. While some people know what they want to build before they get here, most people decide after the batch starts.

Alumni network

We have a tight-knit community of nearly 300 alumni across 24 countries, and our alumni network has become one of the most valuable parts of being a Hacker Schooler.
Our motto is "never graduate," and we remain in close contact with and continue to support our alumni long after their batch ends. We open our Monday night talks and dinners to alumni, and invite them to code with us on Thursdays. We also host regular alumni events, and our alumni organize biweekly alumni lunches.
We specifically select for friendly people, and our alumni routinely help each other and current Hacker Schoolers. They do everything from doing code reviews to giving career and interview advice (we have alumni at most of the big tech companies, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google).
Hacker Schoolers have lots of interests beyond programming, and they frequently choose to spend their evenings and weekends hanging out and exploring New York. Past batches have made countless trips to beaches, museums, restaurants, and concerts, and have organized everything from lock-picking and knitting groups to poker nights.
Many alumni have described Hacker School as the best three months of their lives.

Jobs, recruiting and how we make money

Hacker School is free for everyone because companies pay us to recruit. We have agreements with a few dozen tech companies (from small startups to bigger companies like Tumblr, Twitter, and Venmo), and these companies pay us if they hire a Hacker School alum. The verdict is still out if this is a long-term, scalable business model, but we are committed to making Hacker School as accessible as possible.
There is no requirement to take a job after Hacker School, however, we ask that if you do want a programming job, you work with us to find it. The overwhelming majority of Hacker School alumni who have wanted jobs after the batch have gotten them.
Many people are surprised to learn that we do not take applicants' desire for a new programming job or their employability into account when making admissions decisions. Instead, we admit people based on if we think they'd benefit from and contribute to Hacker School. This is partly because we care much more about making Hacker School great than making money, and partly because we believe this strategy is in our long-term financial self-interest, even if it's not in our short-term financial self-interest.